Canadian Government Executive - Volume 23 - Issue 07

He guards against simplistic sell-jobs and insists that claims be backed up with understandable evidence. Important messages and details get lost in the pile of text. Much of that text is not crafted carefully but is reused text snippets from other sources. Such cut- and-paste jobs result in verbose, disjointed discussions instead of meaningful explanations and coherent arguments. Dumping long pas- sages of text on decision-makers can seem like an agenda is being foist upon them. Coming to a meeting of the minds involves dialogue and tailored briefings, which is tough to pull off with large quantities of text. It is hard to muster the enthusiasm to read long tracts of artless, impersonal prose. Most decision- makers have social work- routines that are not con- ducive to long periods of uninterrupted reading. A briefing binder is usually read en diagonale : skimmed by skipping across pages. Brief memos have a superficial appeal to those who are easily bored. With- out a grasp of the underlying logic and evidence, these memos become a crutch. Words are put into a decision-maker’s mouth, which will look bad when the situation requires going off-script. When abbreviated messages are writ- ten with unfamiliar points of reference, they are perceived as stray factoids. Talking points written in the voice of abstract neutral- ity end up getting revised on the fly, with much meaning lost in translation. Decision-makers who want intellectual engagement react badly to policy that is dumbed down to a series of slogans, euphemisms, and vagaries. Fewmemo writers master a nuanced and pur- poseful microstyle that comes across as pithy while also retaining an air of authoritativeness. SLIDEUMENTS. These “decks” are too wordy to work as overhead slides but not wordy enough to be self-explanatory.* INFO DUMP. Long-form reports and briefing binders aim for deep explanation but usually lapse into longwindedness. MEMO CARDS. Shoehorning too much text into handy cards has caused the card size to grow and become less handy. He craves novelty and has a short attention span for policy details expressed in bureaucratic jargon. She wants policy framed in familiar terms and accepts newmental models only if communicated insightfully. A communications revolution has taken place but you would not know it by looking at the way officials brief up the chain of authority. Briefing documents remain a throw-back to the days of typewriters, formmemos, and tabbed binders. Technology enables deeper engagement. It also makes it easier to dump poorly crafted text onto decision-makers without meeting their needs. Stepping through a series of slides feels like being led down a garden path; that is, confined to a single story- line and logic. That limits the scope of conversation instead of enabling a robust exploration of policy options. Corny “clipart” distracts, adds no visual clarity. Complicated ideas are either broken up into a fixed sequence, making comparison across the whole difficult, or are squished into a single slide. Diagrams tend to be made of labelled shapes that are too abstract to engage the imagination. Bullet points are cryptic sentence fragments that are hard to decypher after a talk. That abbreviated and disjointed way of communicating is full of buzzwords, empty jargon, and other muddles. The resulting concentration problems and boredom is called “death by bulletpoint.” 10 / Canadian Government Executive // October 2017